CONTENTS

Agility

Ooda Loops

Overall Ooda Design Tool

'Observation' Tool

'Orientation' Tool

'Decision' Tool

'Action' Tool

Observation Phase

Orientation Phase

Decision Phase - TRIZ

Action Phase - Agility

INTRODUCTION
Since the mid-1970's, there has been a subtle yet increasing awareness that the dominant business model of the 20th century, based upon limited product variability and mass production manufacturing techniques, no longer is applicable to the rapidly-fragmenting, information-intensive, electronically wired and individually-customized global marketplace which has emerged. The pervasiveness and universality of this awareness has been accelerated in the past few years with the explosive growth and penetration of the Internet and its diversity of e-Commerce / e-Business implementations.

Post-mass production models to address the new commerce of "controlled chaos" are currently in a state of evolutionary refinement. However, there is widespread agreement that their principal characteristic must be AGILITY, that is, the ability to adapt to, or to lead, constant, accelerated, uncertain and unpredictable change.

Today, the pervasiveness of change in the global business environment is forcing organizations across a broad diversity of manufacturing, service, academic and governmental institutions to apply Agile business practices in order to survive and grow in their turbulent market environments. And at the heart of Agility is SPEED - the capability of an enterprise to rapidly execute decision making and operational cycles.

The execution of the decision making process may be viewed as involving the cycling through of four distinctive but interdependent stages: 1) OBSERVATION, or absorbing information from the environment by all possible means; 2) ORIENTATION, or placing this information into a matrix of human understanding and experience; 3) DECISION, or selecting a subsequent course of action based upon the likelihood of either offensive achievement or defensive nullification; and 4) ACTION, or attempting to operationalize or carry out the previously conceived decision. Collectively, these stages have come to be known as an OODA loop, a concept created by the late USAF fighter pilot and strategist, Col. John R. Boyd (see any of the references by Richards). There is a growing body of evidence that not only armies (e.g., the allied forces in Desert Storm) but also companies (e.g., Boeing; the "new" IBM; the reengineered UNISYS; CNN) that have streamlined their decision cycles (that is, enhanced their OODA loop processing) enjoy a decisive competitive advantage. It is this OODA process which is proposed as the unifying model for the digital commerce environment and its dependence upon the many characteristics, strategies, tools and implementations of general Agility principles.

Both the concept of Agility (the ability to change maneuver states; the time derivative of maneuverability) and of OODA loop processing were conceptualized on the military battlefield. Executive-speak to the contrary, business is not war, at least not in the literal sense. Nonetheless, the competitive business marketplace does share with the military battlefield many of the same fundamental components and principles involved in warfare: determining where and how to "attack" its perceived markets; protect and grow its citizens (customer base); and overwhelm its competitor(s), as examples. Perhaps the most significant similarity, however, that businesses share with their military counterparts is that the mental aspects of conflict (that is, the rapidity and effectiveness with which an organization cycles through its OODA loops) have come to replace the physical aspects of competition (i.e., size, power and wealth) as the dominant contributor to, and determinant of, competitive success. AMAZON.COM and DELL COMPUTER are but two of a growing panoply of examples of this competitive business truth.

AGILITY
AGILITY is commonly defined, in the business vernacular, as the ability of an organization to thrive in competitive marketplaces which are characterized by continuous, accelerated, and often unpredictable rates and types of change, and which are synonymous with the Internet, World Wide Web, and e-Commerce / e-Business environments. Unlike FLEXIBILITY, which is an enterprise's planned responsiveness to anticipated contingencies (i.e., scenario planning), Agility's objective is to minimize the resistance to change in any direction. The directions, or metrics of change that Agility encompasses, include:

A) The SPEED with which an organization is capable of instituting change
B) The COST associated with incremental change
C) The ROBUSTNESS or stability of the changed state
D) The SCOPE or breadth of change from the initial state
E) The FREQUENCY with which an organization is able to change
F) The ACCURACY or correctness of the enterprise's identified change target
G) The PRECISION with which an enterprise achieves its change objective

Agility is implementable in one of two strategic modes: either pro-actively (i.e., leading change; disrupting markets and competitors); or reactively (responding to change, either opportunistic or degenerative). Of these, pro-active is the preferable mode in that it places (keeps) one's competitors in a defensive and reactive operational posture, preventing them from defining the market on their own terms. This is especially significant in the e-Commerce / e-Business environment where change can, and has, instantaneously destroyed existing markets and spawned new global competitors and products.

Currently, there are three operational Agility spheres:

A) Mass customization, or the ability of an enterprise to fragment its market (s) into ever smaller niches (even down to lot quantities of one), and to treat those niches with specialized products and services
B) Accelerated change rate, in which change is a marketplace constant, and increasing clockspeed is an expected and predictable characteristic. This type of Agility is usually evident in, and is driven by, high tech environments.
C) Dynamic organizational reinvention, in which an enterprise is able to rapidly transform itself by reconfiguring its management structure, business processes, and market/channel relationships in response to an unanticipated and paradigm shift-inducing opportunity or threat.

OODA LOOPS
The study of Agile "command and control" execution starts with a simple model of the process known as the OODA loop. The OODA loop applies to any two-sided conflict, whether militaristic (where it was initially defined) or economic (where it applied in this paper). OODA, as defined above, is an acronym for Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action, and which describes the basic command-control process.

When an enterprise is engaged in conflict (as in determining how to lead, or respond to, a competitive change initiative, e.g., drive a market; blunt a competitor's strategic thrust; employ a new technology; etc.), its first activity is to OBSERVE the situation - that is, to take in raw and unprocessed data about its own status, its marketplace, its customers, its competitors, its partners, regulators, channels and operational environment. Sometimes an enterprise actively seeks that information (in today's jargon, "pulls" information): sometimes that information is thrust ("pushed") upon it. In the Internet/e-Business world, both the volume of available data, and a richness of divergent forms of that data, are available on a continuous, real-time basis.

Having OBSERVED the situation, the enterprise next ORIENTS itself - that is, performs certain analyses and makes certain estimates, assumptions and judgments about the situation in order to create a cohesive mental model or image of the total environment. In simple terms, the enterprise attempts to determine what the changing/changed situation means to it and how it will be impacted.

Based on ORIENTATION, the enterprise next DECIDES what to do - regardless of whether that decision is self-contained or involves other entities (including customers, suppliers, partners, regulators and even competitors), and whether that decision takes the form of an immediate action or involves the creation of a deliberate plan and a delayed response.

Finally, the enterprise puts its DECISION into ACTION. This includes disseminating the decision, supervising its execution, and monitoring the results of the ACTION through feedback. This completes one iteration of the OODA cycle, and returns the enterprise to the OBSERVATION phase. For having ACTED, the situation is now changed, thus initiating a new OODA cycle. (It is worth noting that, in any organization with multiple decision requirements and multiple decision makers, multiple OODA loops may be "spinning" simultaneously or concurrently. One of Agility's objectives is to achieve enterprise integration through coordination of these multiple independent loops).

Importantly, the OODA loop process that command and control, whether centralized or decentralized, and conducted organizationally or individually, is a CONTINUOUS and cyclical process. In any competitive environment, the antagonist/enterprise that can consistently and effectively cycle through the OODA process faster - that is, can maintain a higher tempo of actions - than its competitors gains an ever-increasing advantage with each cycle. With each iteration, the slower competitor falls further and further behind and becomes increasingly unable to cope with the continuously deteriorating situation. The Japanese call this result suki, or the creating of discontinuities in the opponent's concentration. With each cycle, the slower competitor's actions become less relevant to the situation.

Cycling faster than one's competitors is the key to successfully managing customer relationships and competing in e-Commerce / e-Business environments, where a customer may be thousands of miles removed from a company's bricks-and-mortar facility, but where one's competitors are only a mouse click away. The applicability of OODA loop processing to Agility, and its value as the unifying model for Agile e-Commerce / e-Business enterprise design and implementation, derive from the importance that OODA looping places on the tempo of command and control. Speed is an essential element in executing effective command and control. Speed in command and control means shortening the time needed to make decisions, to plan, coordinate and communicate. OODA speed is a critical component of Agility, and especially so in environments that are large, complex, non-linear, unpredictable and continuously changing. These are the precise characteristics that mark global business competition today … and that will only continue to intensify in the future.

Since business is competitive, it is not absolute speed that matters, bur rather speed relative to one's customers and competitors. The aim is to be faster in OODA processing than one's competitor(s), and to lead or respond to challenges and opportunities within a customer's time requirements with effective, customized solutions. Focused solutions provide significantly greater customer value than is achievable through the production and delivery of commodity-type or non-customized products and services.

The speed differential does not have to be a large one: a small advantage, exploited repeatedly, can quickly lead to decisive results (e.g., the Honda-Yamaha motorcycle "war"). Continuously operating faster (that is, "within") competitors' OODA cycles places those competitors in the unenviable position of continuously reacting, rather than pro-acting, in the marketplace. As such, the potential to disrupt competitors' focus and concentration, and the subsequent deterioration of their competitiveness, are greatly enhanced.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT and CHANGE PROFICIENCY
An Agile enterprise is a creative entity that is continuously exploring, learning, testing, innovating, implementing, measuring - in essence, an organization in a state of ongoing and perpetual proactive and reactive change. As such, it has an imperative to balance the acquisition and creation of knowledge (Knowledge Management) with its rapid application (Change Proficiency) to a constantly fluid environment. To be proficient at OODA execution means to be proficient in managing the capture and analysis of knowledge, and to be proficient in applying that knowledge effectively - whether such knowledge is of a market opportunity, a production methodology, a business practice, a product or process technology, an individual's skills, a competitor's threat, a customer's requirement, etc.

The concepts of Knowledge Management and Change Proficiency are not new. Organizations throughout time have practiced both successfully, or have ceased to exist. What IS new is the need for more formal and directed understanding and application of these practices through the formality of OODA loop processing in order to achieve world class levels of Agility. What used to be performed informally and at haphazard pace is no longer adequate in the frenetic and fragmented global e-Commerce / e-Business economy.

Balancing the two competencies of Knowledge Management and Change Proficiency within the OODA loop process is extremely important. Too much Knowledge Management leads to information overload and analytical paralysis. Too much Change Proficiency (i.e., a disproportionate focus on change without a balancing knowledge component), can easily lead to spastic and inappropriate activity.

TOOLS FOR THE OODA PROCESS
Several management science and Information Technology tools are available today to assist an enterprise in constructing and implementing an effective Agility-based OODA process. From these tools, an integrated architecture specifically designed for the change-intensive and often unpredictable e-Commerce / e-Business competitive environment has been developed.

OVERALL OODA DESIGN TOOL
In 1991, Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute introduced a Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to provide an evolutionary framework for continuous enterprise process improvement. Initially designed to assist software organizations in developing mature software management processes, the methodology has subsequently been generalized and applied to a broad spectrum of enterprise development and enhancement processes.

The CMM employs a formal structure which organizes a process into five maturity levels, each of which lays the successive foundation for continuous process improvement. Each level consists of a set of process goals that, when satisfied, stabilize an important component of the process. Achieving a level of maturity qualifies a different component of the process, resulting in an increase in the organization's overall process capability. The five levels of CMM maturity are:

1) INITIAL - Few, if any formal processes, exist
2) REPEATABLE - Basic process management practices are established
3) DEFINED - Overall process is formalized and consistently deployed
4) MANAGED - Quality measures are developed and applied
5) OPTIMIZED - Continuous improvement and radical change initiatives are routinely applied

Under the sponsorship of the United States Department of Defense, Lehigh University's Agile Manufacturing Enterprise Forum (later renamed the Agility Forum), developed a variation of the CMU / SEI Capability Maturity Model. This variant, specifically designed for Agile principles and practices, is known as the Change Proficiency Maturity Model (CPMM). The CPMM applies a similar five-level architecture of increasingly Agile business practices:

1) ACCIDENTAL: No formal process; changes occurs on an ad hoc basis
2) REPEATABLE: Prior successes for the basis for "lessons learned" change
3) DEFINED: Formal change process initiated; change metrics employed
4) MANAGED: Change managers appointed; company-wide process installed
5) AGILE: Principle-based adaptability; conscious change engineering

The Agility-focused Change Capability Maturity Model addresses the change proficiency disciplines areas of: 1) Vision and Strategy 2) Business Case Justification 3) Innovation Management 4) Relationship Management 5) Knowledge Management 6) Performance Metrics

A FORMALIZED MODEL FOR e-COMMERCE / e-BUSINESS DECISION MAKING IMPROVEMENT
Given the complexity of today's global e-Empowered marketplace, the veritable glut of electronic data, and the unpredictable nature of competitive, technological, regulatory, financial and process change, a means of formalizing and institutionalizing enterprise decision making via the OODA loop process appears to be warranted. To this end, a model has been developed which identifies, for each of the OODA loop's individual components (Observation - Orientation - Decision -Action), a tool to facilitate and support the execution of that component's activities. Each of the tools feeds forward (and backward where feedback is involved) into the loop's subsequent (and prior) processes, creating an integrated, holistic decision-making environment.

The CMU / SEI generalized Capability Maturity Model, and the Agility Forum's Change Proficiency-specific Maturity Model, provide the bases on which the e-Commerce / e-Business maturity model has been developed. This model guides the progression of the e-Commerce / e-Business planning and management processes, and of its OODA loop design and implementation methodology, further described in this paper.

'OBSERVATION' TOOL
OODA OBSERVATION involves both the deliberate ("pull") and passive ("push") collecting of raw and unprocessed data that are of potential importance to, and impact on, the enterprise. These data encompass a breadth of disciplines, and include: the general business environment; the company itself (vision, mission, culture, structure, values, etc.); the enterprise's market area(s); its products; its customers; suppliers; competitors (both actual and potential); employees; business partners; regulators (if any); delivery channels; business networks; process technology; and Information (computer / communications / data management) Technology.

To guide the enterprise in gathering relevant data to address the business-critical areas defined above (that is, to formalize the OODA loop's OBSERVE activity), an Agility-focused "Organizational Success Characteristics" questionnaire has been developed. The questionnaire addresses one-hundred Agility-specific business issues. NOTE: The Organizational Success Characteristics Questionnaire draws heavily on a similar instrument that was developed several years ago by the UNISYS Corporation.

By establishing an active and continuous data gathering process that addresses all of the above-cited issues and areas, the e-based enterprise is positioned to monitor the relevant competitive business terrain and its relationship to, and position on, that terrain. This is the principal objective of the OODA loop's OBSERVE function.

'ORIENTATION' TOOL
The process of OODA loop ORIENTATION is that of interpreting and determining the impact of the data acquired in the preceding OODA OBSERVATION step. A tool to assist enterprises in designing an effective ORIENTATION process is the Balanced Scorecard. The Balanced Scorecard is an approach to strategic management that embeds the enterprise's long-term strategy into the management system through the mechanism of measurement. In contrast to traditional, financially based measurement systems, The Balanced Scorecard focuses an organization's attention on future success by setting objectives and measuring performance from several distinct, yet complementary, perspectives - all of which must be effectively and efficiently accomplished if an enterprise is to achieve and maintain a competitive and marketplace capability.

TRADITIONAL BALANCED SCORECARD PERSPECTIVES
Traditional Balanced Scorecard methodologies incorporate the following four perspectives:
The LEARNING AND GROWTH PERSPECTIVE directs attention to the basics of all future success - the organization's people and infrastructure. Adequate investment in these areas is critical to all long term success.
The development of a truly learning-based, Agile organization supports success in the INTERNAL PERSPECTIVE. The Internal Perspective focuses attention on the performance of the key internal processes that drive the business. Improvement in internal processes NOW is a key lead indicator of financial success in the future.
In order to translate superior processes into financial success, companies must first fulfill their customers' needs and expectations. In Agility terms, this means the providing not of dissociated products and services, but rather of integrated solutions which often are complex interrelationships of physical products, responsive service, and appropriate informational components. The CUSTOMER PERSPECTIVE considers the business through the eyes of the customer, so that the enterprise retains a central focus on customer needs and satisfaction.
The FINANCIAL PERSPECTIVE incorporates traditional measures which reflect an enterprise's achieved marketplace performance and which define the economic value that the business returns to its investors and shareholders.

AN AGILITY-SUPPORTIVE BALANCED SCORECARD
The Agile Balanced Scorecard methodology builds on traditional four-component Balanced Scorecard offerings by introducing and incorporating a fifth perspective, that of Agility. The AGILITY PERSPECTIVE focuses the organization's attention on its proficiency in leading and/or adapting to change. Change capability mastery is a fundamental business requirement for e-Commerce / e-Business enterprises whose competitive cycles are driven at Internet speed.

Collectively, the five Agile Balanced Scorecard perspectives provide, to the OODA ORIENTATION component, a comprehensive measurement and analysis focus that identifies the issues, meanings and impacts on the enterprise's current status, and likely future performance as an Agile, e-Commerce / e-Business entity.

'DECISION' TOOL
In OODA/Agility loop processing, DECISION is the process of determining a course of action to be pursued, based upon the acquisition and interpretation of data/information / knowledge as implemented in the OODA loop's 'OO' components. In the highly competitive e-Commerce / e-Business environment, a combination of decision making speed and enriched creativity are necessary. A practicable tool has been developed in Russia to guide such a decision making process. It is known as TRIZ, the Cyrillic acronym for the "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving."

TRIZ is a mechanism that promotes creative or "out of the box" thinking about complex problems and opportunities, i.e., those for which there is no known solution, the resolution of which requires non-standard, innovative concepts and ideas. Initially developed in Russia by Genrich Alshuller of the Soviet Union's Patent Office, and subsequently refined and extended over the last fifty years+ by research scientists and practitioners throughout the world, TRIZ guides decision makers and problem solvers, in a systematic and modular manner, into non-standard thought patterns and atypical potential solution spaces.

Today, the TRIZ methodology incorporates a blending of classical (Altshuller-developed) and modern (ex-Altshuller-developed) concepts, components and tools. These include:

1) Ideal Final Result: Traditional problem solving methods and thought processes seek resolution through compromise, i.e., by balancing or trading off the positive and negative impacts of a potential course of action. By contrast, the Ideal Final Result describes a problem solution which has all of the benefits, none of the detriments, introduces no additional complexity and carries none of the costs of the original system.
2) Technical Zone of Conflict: A technical conflict is the result of a proposed solution which, in improving one characteristic of a system, causes the deterioration of another characteristic of that system. TRIZ's objective is to resolve all technical conflicts associated with a potential solution by eliminating, reducing, or not worsening the system's negative aspects while concurrently improving its positive ones.
3) Physical Zone of Conflict: A physical conflict occurs when Opposite, contradictory, and mutually exclusive properties are Required of the same component or characteristic of a system (i.e., a requirement exists both to increase, and to decrease, the same characteristic of a system). As with technical conflicts, TRIZ resolves physical conflicts through compromise-negating Innovative concepts and principles.
4) Separation Principles: Separation principles are TRIZ operators that guide conflict resolution by proposing the partitioning of a system's components and / or activities. The types of segmentation incorporated into TRIZ include:

A) In space
B) In time
C) Within a whole object and its parts (separation of contradictory functions
D) Upon conditions
E) Separating a part from the whole (isolation of undesirable properties, functions, characteristics)

5) Contradiction Matrix and Inventive Principles: Traditional Triz's (Altshuller-developed) initial classification system for inventive problems employed a 2X2 Contradiction Matrix. The X and Y axes of this matrix contain 39 unique engineering parameters (i.e., speed, force, strength, etc.) which Altshuller determined formed the bases for all technical patents. The coordinates or intersections of these axes are represented by one or more of 40 unique operators or underlying principles (i.e., segmentation, extraction, equipotentiality, etc.) that Altshuller identified as resolving that category of technical contradiction. (For example, in addressing a conflict involving weight vs volume of a moving object, Extraction, Copying, Pneumatic or Hydraulic Construction and Composite Materials are suggested as possible solutions).
6) Inventive Problem Solving (IPS): Inventive Problem Solving is a TRIZ application that systematically guides individuals in solving inventive problems. It employs a five-step process that includes:

A) Problem documentation
B) Problem formulation
C) Innovation direction prioritization
D) Solution concept development
E) Results evaluation and plan implementation

7) Anticipatory Failure Determination, or the identification of potential problems BEFORE they occur by systematically attempting, through directed and creative thought processes, to sabotage and render the system inoperable.
8) Directed Evolution, a process that assesses a system's current development stage, identifies alternative potential evolutionary vectors, and provides the basis for directed future development.
9) ARIZ, an algorithmic process which computerizes many of the TRIZ logical activities, resulting in an abbreviated learning period and more rapid implementation of inventive problem solutions.

Many TRIZ software tools and products have been developed, and are available in the commercial marketplace, to assist individuals in resolving problems of an engineering or technical nature. The architecture described in this paper employs TRIZ, however, in applying inventive problem solving concepts and principles to indeterminate classes and types of general strategic, tactical and operational e-Commerce / e-Business issues, opportunities, conflicts and competitive threats.

'ACTION' TOOL
ACTION is the culmination of the OODA loop process. It results in the enterprise's execution of a reactive response or of a pro-active initiative. An Agile, e-Commerce /  e-Business enterprise's ACTION objective is to be unconstrained, or at worst to be minimally constrained, in its ability to conceptualize and implement change in ANY direction, regardless of whether that change is organizational, operational, technological, product or process oriented, or is some combination of these. As such, Agility is not only the OODA process's ACTION tool, but also the fundamental and imperative core competence for any would-be-successful global competitor whose products / services / markets / channels / relationships are characterized by continuous and / or unpredictable and rapid change.

The need for competitive Agility has been occasioned by two complementary forces:

1) The rise of the electronically wired, universally accessible and increasingly interdependent global e-Business community
2) The development of rapidly reconfigurable and reusable (Agile) production technologies and processes

A result of the convergence of communications and production technologies has been the deterioration of traditional markets served by traditional, hierarchically structured and mass production-focused enterprises. In their place is emerging a new business model - the ad hocratic, electronically-interconnected enterprise or "virtual organization." The virtual enterprise is comprised of the temporary electronic linking, pooling and coordinating of independent enterprises' organizational units, intellectual properties, and production capabilities. It is especially effective in the emerging globally competitive e-marketplace which increasingly is characterized by specialization, fragmentation, and speed and pervasiveness of change - elements which even the largest and most resource-endowed of enterprises find themselves no longer able, on a stand-alone basis, to adequately address.

This 'virtual' capability is especially well served by the Internet and World Wide Web protocols, whose capacity for integrating services from diverse organizations is rapidly transforming the norm of business practice from competition by individual companies to competition by electronically coordinated/integrated networks of companies or "webs." Many businesses have already recognized that connectivity to the Internet, and effective exploitation of available Internet services are, and increasingly will become, major factors in their overall competitiveness, and have committed both strategies and resources to their implementation. For these forward-looking organizations, relationships with suppliers, partners and customers will soon be mediated almost exclusively using Internet / Intranet / Extranet technology … resulting in dynamic reconfiguration and inter / intra company process integration becoming deeper, broader and more seamless than even recently believed possible. The complex inter-dynamics of this environment will place increasing demands for increasingly rapid and accurate OODA loop processing … both for each partnering organization in the virtual enterprise, and for the virtual entity as a whole.

Over the next few years, Internet-type technology will also transform the role of the Information Technology / Information Systems department from its currently perceived function of dedicated internal support. The feasibility to deliver a greater diversity of networked services over public networks is creating opportunities for new models of how information systems are conceived, implemented and sourced. The time is rapidly approaching, through the establishment of syntactic (e.g., XML) and semantic (e.g., ontologies of vertical business areas and practices) standards, when it will be possible to create, on demand, the necessary (Agile) information infrastructure to support complex virtual enterprises, to enable their successful operation with minimal human intervention, and to dismantle them when they are no longer needed.

This will be possible at various granularities:

1) Supporting discrete, short term activities between small teams working across enterprise boundaries - for example, collaborating on individual activities or participating in isolated business processes
2) Enabling a tactical response, for example at the business unit level, to repel a competitive threat or to capitalize on a market opportunity
3) Sustaining long term, strategic electronic commerce arrangements that deeply integrate an enterprise's core processes with its supply, demand and value chains and affinity groups - resulting in complex, multifaceted virtual businesses
4) RosettaNet has already facilitated the development of an electronics industry-supportive ontology for e-Commerce / e-Business facilitation. Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute has created a software-driven Agile Assembly Architecture. This architecture, which incorporates standard manufacturing ontology, supports the dynamic linkage of reconfigurable/reusable intelligent manufacturing modules based on dynamic and changing market and customer demands.

CONCLUSION
Today, the acceleration of change in the global e-Commerce / e-Business environment is forcing organizations across a broad diversity of manufacturing, service, academic and governmental institutions to become more Agile, that is, to increase the number of iterations while decreasing the duration per-iteration of their OODA decision-action cycles. Market fragmentation, global competition, electronically mediated relationships, e-Commerce / e-Business communities, information communication efficiencies and other business trends (e.g., virtual enterprising, competitor partnering, business reengineering, etc.) are placing demands on business organizations to respond ever more quickly and adaptively to meet ever-changing market, customer, and competitive demands. Because of the central role of Information Technology in enabling and empowering the modern and Agile enterprise, which one might view as a globally wired and information intensive electronic "chameleon", increasing pressures are being placed on IT management to support accelerating business requirements for fluidity and change.
With that capability in hand, an organization has at its command the tools and processes it needs to accelerate its OODA cycling and to maintain its ongoing competitive viability in an increasingly e-Commerce / e-Business dominated world.